Processor

Trying to perhaps avoid a large media backlash, Qualcomm has rather silently announced its decision to not push through with its Snapdragon 802 processor. This statement comes just a month after the chip maker unveiled at CES 2014 the chip that will drive its formal venture into the realm of Smart TVs.

Intel may still have a throne over at the PC world, but in the mobile land it still has to conquer its own territory. Part of Intel's problems lie with a graphics processor that is unfit for mobile devices, but the chip maker might already have a solution ready for some real-world testing.

This week a seemingly run of the mill bit of patent litigation has lit up the Apple analyst boards as the company's A7 chip has been placed at the center of a rather public trial. It's not the idea that the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation could be on the winning side of this battle with Apple that's sparking chatter, but the possibilities inside proceedings that might be of major interest. It's during the defense itself that Apple "will likely be forced to reveal proprietary details about its A7 chip", says PFHub, details Apple certainly isn't going to want to be showing off to just anyone.

The fact that the ARM architecture is finally breaking into other spaces beyond mobile devices is proven by this latest piece of news. AMD has just announced the Opteron A1100, an ARM-based system-on-chip designed exclusively for servers.

With the soaring popularity of smartphones and tablets, the demand for PCs is on the decline. 2013 was one of the slowest years of PC sales on record and that trend doesn't look like it will change anytime soon. With poor demand for PCs, Intel has announced that it is delaying the opening of a new factory in the US.

Microsoft has quietly upgraded the Surface Pro 2, with new hardware including faster processors being sent out to those who returned their Windows 8 tablets after the December firmware update debacle. Although Microsoft yanked the firmware package before every Surface Pro 2 user could upgrade it, some owners sent back their tablets for replacement, only to find, WinBeta reports, that the hardware returned had a newer generation of Intel Core i5 processor inside.

Qualcomm is readying a new kind of artificial brain chip, dubbed neural processing units (NPUs), modeling human cognition and opening the door to phones, computers, and robots that could be taught in the same ways that children learn. The first NPUs are likely to go into production by 2014, CTO Matt Grob confirmed at the MIT Technology Review EmTech conference, with Qualcomm in talks with companies about using the specialist chips for artificial vision, more efficient and contextually-aware smartphones and tablets, and even potentially brain implants.

The teardown of the iPhone 5s has officially gotten microscopic. With the team at chipworks making it their mission to get down and dirty with the heartiest Apple chip on the market today, the iPhone 5s has joined the ranks of the devices that our current teardown culture has seen fit to take apart down to the tiniest of details. Tearing the top off the processor as you'd see it first when you pop off the back of the iPhone 5s (not recommended, by the way,) a new conglomeration is revealed.

Recent rumors are suggesting that HTC is working on an updated model of the One smartphone. And just to clarify, we are not talking about the often rumored HTC One Max, but another variant of the HTC One. According to the details, HTC is working on a new model One with an octa-core processor and 3GB of RAM.

More information on the Apple A7 processor and its M7 motion coprocessor has appeared this week along with a set of suggestions on what Apple is working on for the system next. This system exists right this minute inside the iPhone 5S, bringing with it a bit of "always-on" measuring of motion data. This data is taken from the iPhone's built-in set of sensors, the same set as delivered in iPhones for several generations past: accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass.